FilmFocus

Andreas Ströhl

On the Threat to American Bodies: The View From Abroad Inside a Movie
Theater

Andreas Max Ströhl is the former head of the
Cultural Program Department at the Goethe-Institut Prague, Czech Republic, the
former director of the Film Department at the Head Office of the Goethe-Institut
in Munich, as well as the former director of the Department of Film, Film
Production, TV and Radio of the Goethe-Institut Inter Nationes. He is the
founding director of Days of European Film in Prague and Brno, Czech Republic,
and has served as a guest lecturer on media theory at the University of
Innsbruck, Austria. Since 2003/04, he has been serving as the executive director
of Internationale Münchner Filmwochen GmbH (International Munich Film Weeks),
as director of Filmfest München (Munich Filmfest), and as managing director of
Internationales Festival der Filmhochschulen (International Festival of Film
Schools) Munich. He as published widely on critical theory and film, including
the edited collection, Vilém Flusser: Writings (Univ. of Minnesota
Press, 2002). The URL for the Munich Filmfest is http://www.filmfest-muenchen.de/.
"On the Threat to American Bodies" is based on a talk given at the
Amerikahaus München in fall of 2006.

Historians of culture take it for granted that popular culture
and the entertainment industry react to moods and trends among broad sections of
the population in immediate and seismographically precise ways. Cinema is often
considered to directly mirror the anxieties of entire societies and the way they
imagine threat. The German expressionist cinema of the 1920s, for example, is
often seen to show the feeling of insecurity caused by the instability of the
post-war era. Japanese Godzilla movies, similarly, are said to digest the trauma
of nuclear bombings and radioactive contamination.

Is it an anthropological and psychological constant to play with
imagined fears in a pleasure-orientated way by projecting evil onto the external
world? Can this become the basis of politics? Are these imagined fears inherent
in the medium of film and thus the same for all time? Do different genres merely
cross different borders, or does American cinema reflect specific, topical fears
with instinctive sureness? Does it portray the mental situation of our age? Does
Hollywood accompany, support, or perhaps even stir up the threat to America as
claimed by the Bush Administration through well-directed and dramatized
visualizations?

I will not try to answer these questions in this essay. Instead,
I will take a look at some randomly chosen American feature films, mainly from
the last ten years, and offer some observations on their striking commonalities,
which in turn will allow us to recognize some shared constants. While my sample
is admittedly small, and thus not truly representative, I invite readers to draw
their own conclusions with regard to the correspondences between a more general
collective consciousness and a nation’s mentality. I will bypass numerous
conceivable thematic variations and historical genres of film, such as film
noir, hardboiled detective movies, Western movies, cold war spy films or
slasher movies. Instead, I have chosen to focus on science-fiction thrillers in
which the threat originates from as far away as possible: outer space.

Before pointing out the common features of some more famous
science fiction thrillers, however, let me take a moment to touch upon some
other genres, particularly those exemplary films often cited to actually shed
light on a collective psyche by looking at its image production—similar to the
way psychiatrists or psychoanalysts give crayons and paper to their patients
because their drawings bear witness of what moves or ails them.

Around 1920 the German cinema suffered from a loss of the
feeling of realism. The trauma experienced by most people during the Great War
had been so violent that the world was often perceived as dead and extinct.
Humankind felt absolutely small and naked, suffered from a feeling of
dislocation and consequently created powers and ghosts that were beyond its
control. Expressionist German silent film is widely interpreted as a reaction to
the breakdown of the Old World and its rigid, secure structure, and to the
horrors of World War I.

The German sentimental films in idealized regional settings (Heimatfilm)
and the Western movie are related genres. Their topic is the correction and
removal of a disturbance within a semantic space, a social system or a
topographic area that is to a large extent closed to the outside world. Usually
in a Heimatfilm, the disturbance originates on the outside and the
solution is mastered by the community’s own efforts from within. In Western
movies, however, both the initial disturbance and the figure of the savior tend
to come from outside the closed off community. The entrance of the cavalry as a deus
ex machina shows a profound trust and faith in the authority of the state,
which could by and large no longer be summoned after the end of the period of
the classic Western movie—or, to put it differently, since the Vietnam War.

In contrast, science fiction movies and thrillers with
extraterrestrial protagonists always present the distant—and thus the other or
alien—as incomprehensible, different and negative. They take up the
topology of evil. It is no coincidence that the characters personifying sinister
and evil qualities now are strangers, while those overcoming evil have become
locals.

Among the filmic examples one could enlist to illustrate the
topic of a direct threat are Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens
(Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1922), Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931), The
Thing From Another World (Christian Nyby, 1951), The Exorcist
(William Friedkin, 1973), Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977), Alien (Ridley
Scott, 1979), Independence Day (Roland Emmerich, 1996), Armageddon
(Michael Bay, 1998), Deep Impact (Mimi Leder, 1998), Enemy of the
State (Tony Scott, 1998) and The Siege (Edward Zwick, 1998), among
many others. Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind
(1977) plays a special role, in this regard. It is the only (or one of the few)
alien-focused films that portrays extraterrestrials as friendly and as a
potential complement and contribution to life on earth. With his 1982 release E.T.
Steven Spielberg continues this exceptional attitude of appreciation of the
alien. Later this will be the basis of a biting parody in Tom Burton’s Mars
Attacks! (1996).

Invasion films of this kind often feature the following
commonalities:

The threat comes from the outside. (However, because
the resident often incubates the alien evil on the inside, the relationship
between host and threat suggests an obvious parallel to the motif of
exorcisms). Examples of this feature include The Thing From Another World,
Alien, Independence Day, Armageddon, Deep Impact, The
Siege. In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the mother barricades
the house, while a record needle gets stuck and replays the telling line again
and again: "the moment you come into view." In Alien, the
evil comes from the outside but hatches from inside human bodies and on the
inside of the narrated world, a motif familiar from realistic narrative texts
of the nineteenth century.

Children, naVve adults, and more generally childlike and
innocent characters are the ones to welcome the foreign power; they are
responsive to the other and feel attracted to it; the kingdom of heaven
belongs to such as them. Examples of this type of response include Close
Encounters of the Third Kind and Independence Day.

Notwithstanding this general responsiveness to the other, it
is children or adolescents who best know how to deal with the challenge. They
are the ones to save the world, as in Enemy of the State. The kids in Independence
Day have obviously learned from the film Alien. When Dylan is asked
what he has been up to, the boy answers, "Shooting aliens."

In spite of all the know-it-alls and apostles of peace,
immediate destruction of the aliens turns out to be the best response to their
appearance, or "invasion." The doomsayers and the voices of mistrust
prove to be right. In The Thing From Another World, the obviously
intelligent alien being is just called a, well, "thing." However,
since that "thing" turns out to be more powerful than humans, humans
are legitimised in their fear of it. In Alien, the one to insist on
following the rules of quarantine—"if we let it in, the ship could be
infected"—later finds herself the only survivor. Independence Day
and The Siege also fall into this category.

Aliens are typically portrayed as malicious parasites
in the system/body or as plundering predators, often appearing like giant
insects or locusts. Their repulsive look is always monster-like, as in Independence
Day.

Aliens are always technologically (and sometimes biologically)
sophisticated and superior to humans, as in The Thing From Another World,
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien and Independence
Day. As Ash (Ian Holm) in Alien puts it, "The alien is a
perfect organism. Superbly structured, cunning, quintessentially violent. With
your limited capabilities you have no chance against it." The Siege
sports a similar description to identify an Islamic terror group, telling the
viewer twice that "in this game, the most committed wins."

It is always Americans who coordinate the worldwide struggle
against the alien invader, and often they fight it all alone. Significantly,
while sci-fi thrillers often present images of exotic people in other
countries before and/or after America’s global rescue operation, such people
are typically absent during action sequences. The fate of the world lies in
America‘s hands, as it does in Armageddon, Deep Impact and Independence
Day. The latter, in particular, best exemplifies the idea of manifest
destiny that is already encoded in the film’s very title. July 4th
turns into the global national holiday, with the US president mutating into a
fighter pilot and reaching the final stage of this metamorphosis to coincide
with Independence Day. Ever since, George W. Bush has tried to re-enact this
enigmatic image as a variant of himself, visiting aircraft carriers, wearing a
pilot’s overall and carrying a helmet under his arm. Again, the big
exception to this rule is Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which
features none other than François Truffaut as a French UFO expert.

It is the simple man, the redneck of the Midwest who is able
to help himself – not the institutions or authorities or the state. He is
the one that wins the battle. Following American revolutionary traditions and
in accordance with the American Way of Life and the American Dream, it is
often the educational failures and dropouts, with their high-carb diet, that
make it in the end, as in Independence Day and Armageddon.

In principle, the fighters have lots of fun doing battle, even
if combat with the monster often culminates in self-sacrifice. (In this
respect, the soldiers of the cause exceed most propaganda films of the Third
Reich). Along with acknowledgement within the family, self-sacrifice is in
itself the highest virtue. Suicide assassins for the cause are shown to be
patriotic, heroic solutions to the problem, as in Independence Day, Armageddon,
Deep Impact, and The Siege.

Millions of intelligent beings (often suggested to be more
intelligent than their human counterparts) get killed. However, these life
forms are deemed unimportant, because they are positioned as invading
strangers, as in Independence Day.

These films foreground the thrill of destroying the American
and European civilization by invading outsiders. Symbolic landmarks, such as
the Eiffel Tower, go up in flames, as in Independence Day or Deep
Impact. Armageddon shows the towering inferno of the burning World
Trade Center (in 1998).

Notwithstanding heavy losses on a global scale, humanity
regroups and is reborn from a new nucleus family (very much like Noah‘s, and
often, animals join in, too), as in Independence Day, Armageddon
and Deep Impact.

Edward Zwick’s 1998 release The Siege stands out from
the rest of these invasion scenarios. The film anticipates the attacks of
September 11, 2001, with astonishing exactness, and it portrays with amazing
accuracy the hysterical anxieties, mass panic and situations of threat that are
able to totally paralyze an entire city or lead it into chaos. After the
abduction of an Islamic religious leader by the US military, New York City
becomes the target of escalating terrorist attacks. As the FBI and CIA hunt down
the terrorist cells responsible for the attacks, the bombings continue, and the
US government responds by declaring martial law. A breathtakingly precise
prophecy of the background and consequences of an attack, the film features
sheik Ahmed bin Talal, who looks like the spitting image of Osama bin Laden and
uncannily anticipates the rhetoric of the so-called War on Terror three
years before the actual attack on the World Trade Center: "the worst kind
of reaction is a reaction that’s based on fear"; "either we answer
this threat quickly and convincingly, or next week, there will be a hundred more
all over the world"; "they’re attacking our way of life";
"what if what they really want is for us to... bend the law, shred the
Constitution just a little bit? Because if we… do that… everything we have
bled and fought and died for is over, and they’ve won." This last line,
in particular is the most accurate and most eerie prediction of the way the Bush
Administration has, just three years later, indeed fallen into the terrorists’
trap and gambled away the United States’ reputation as a law-abiding country.
Or, as we can read from the lips of a terrorist: "So now you have to learn
the consequences of trying to tell to the world how to live." The film even
features a frank discussion among government officials about the efficiency of
different kinds of torture methods (which is echoed in the current release of Rendition),
and suspects are locked up in cages like the ones we have gotten to know from
Guantánamo Bay for reasons less than vague.

Of course, Hollywood’s obvious strain to arouse fear of the
unknown among audiences has long been a provocation to more intellectual
filmmakers and created some suggestive and entertaining samples of
counter-reaction and biting humor. Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or:
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) is actually a
parodic reversal more than a ridiculing of a catastrophic nuclear scenario,
because it emanates from a home-grown commie-hating general gone postal;
similarly, the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski (1998) features a clash
of two different Americas when, by mistake, several prototypes of defeatist
elderly hippies and losers get drawn into a complicated and unclear crime
scheme. Basically, the film’s protagonist, The Dude, and his neurotic friend,
Walter, become the playthings of a rich, conservative paraplegic, his young
artist wife, a bunch of pathetic German nihilist wannabe kidnappers, the Malibu
Police, and a big shot in the porn entertainment industry. The Dude has two
confused but significant dreams of castration related to evil scissors-wielding
Germans and/or Saddam Hussein. However, the culmination of the comedy of The
Big Lebowski is the way The Dude parodies a statement of the President—in
this instance, George Bush, Sr.—echoing his 1991 announcement on TV that
"This will not stand. This will not stand, this aggression against
Kuwait." The Dude uses the same phrase in a most petty context, when thugs
invade his house and urinate on his rug: "This will not stand, you know.
This aggression will not stand, man."

Virtually everything that should be said about the construction
of the threat in the films I am discussing here can be also found in a comical mise
en abyme in Tim Burton’s masterpiece Mars Attacks! (1996). This
highly concentrated parody is not only a brilliant, cynical pamphlet on the
do-gooders’ attitude toward intercultural understanding. The film also
summarizes with encyclopaedic completeness and accuracy everything you need to
know about the movies under scrutiny here, as well as the more generalized
features of their genre: the threat comes from the outside; a naVve crowd
welcomes it joyfully ("Please come to Earth. Please. We need you");
children are the best shooters; and an adolescent failure saves the world.
Contrary to initial appearances, an immediate strike turns out to be the best
response (the First Lady suggests to "kick the crap out of them"). The
Martians are ugly and technologically superior. The audience bears witness to
the destruction of other countries and cultures. However, it is Americans who
save the world, in this case, rednecks from the Midwest with their eclectic
country music. The destruction of numerous symbols of Western civilization is
presented with joy andenthusiasm. The extraterrestrials have fun playing
with humankind. They are more intelligent than human beings, but are in the end
nevertheless butchered without mercy. Thereupon, a young nuclear family calls
for reconstruction: "Now we just have to... start over and start rebuilding
everything, like our houses. But I was thinking, maybe instead of houses we
could live in tepees. Because it’s better in many ways."

A long time before the US President asks the rhetorical
question, "Why can’t we work out our differences? Why can’t we all just
get along?," it has become clear that "our world will never feel quite
the same again." This pronouncement accurately anticipates the phrase
buzzing in the media five years later: "Nothing will ever be the
same."

Of course, the question remains to what extent these
observations are universally valid—whether they are anthropological constants,
so to speak—or if, on the contrary, they suggest something like a
characteristically American mentality or frame of mind. All human beings have
fantasies of anxiety that are culturally coded. In the American tradition, the
meanings of the body and of physicality differ from those in Europe. Europeans
tend to consider their bodies simply as themselves, as the I. It
seems strange to them when they hear Americans referring to their bodies as systems
in an objectifying, functionalist sort of way—perhaps similar to the abstract
way an endocrinologist might talk about the human organism, or the way a car
mechanic might refer to an engine. Americans also put more emphasis on minimal
distances between bodies in the public sphere. In Europe or Asia, by contrast,
you can walk past other people in the street, in a shopping mall or in other
public places at a much closer distance; you can even touch them—if it is not
done intentionally—without having to apologize for the fleeting intrusion of
their private sphere.

In the light of this different attitude towards physical
presence, intimacy and body functions, it does not seem surprising to Europeans
that Americans tend to associate their anxieties with alien powers invading
American bodies—as well as their country of immigration. One could of course
object that the horror portrayed in blockbuster movies is or was not
characteristically "American"; Hollywood, after all, has long become
thoroughly internationalised. However, foreign-born film directors working there
shoot films other than the ones made by American directors. Ang Lee and Roland
Emmerich, for example, do not portray the danger as coming from the outside
(partly because these directors are not part of that danger themselves), but as
a freezing of the interior, as in The Ice Storm (1997) and The Day
After Tomorrow (2004). America’s inner coldness or heat death becomes its
own threat, rather than the immigration of legal aliens importing such viral
coldness. In Emmerich’s vision, US-Americans need to flee from their own icy
cold and seek refuge in Mexico. America itself is the danger. This perspective,
however, tends to be restricted to immigrants and foreigners and has a didactic
quality, with the aftertaste of a consciously designed educational program.

If there is anything like a distillation of such visual
scenarios of threat, it is in the work of the American photographer Gregory
Crewdson. In the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, Holger Liebs
characterized Crewdson’s photographs as follows: "However strange
Crewdson’s scenes may seem in detail, their visual tradition is very familiar.
Actually, we have seen them dozens of times, just like this or perhaps
differently. We have seen them in Hollywood movies that keep telling us since
the 50s how a foreign presence in the shape of malicious aliens is going
to haunt the planet or, more specifically, the suburbs of the American
Midwest. The evil other is of course driven off, so that the core of the state
system, the All American Family, is saved in the end. On occasion, an
extraterrestrial intelligence—whatever it may signify within the American
mythology of late modernism, such as the Red Scare, the danger of terrorism, or
simply chauvinist xenophobia—may also feel disposed to be friendly. Steven
Spielberg’s gentle E.T., for example, is just mistakenly stranded in an urban
wasteland, or The Close Encounter of the Third Kind is portrayed as a rescue
operation of missing world war pilots enhanced by a disco light show. Spielberg’s
exceptions to the rule are based on the same, fundamentally American, primeval
fear that the arrival of the other is inevitable and we are not prepared for
it" (13 September 2005).

Such a characterization may help explain why the attacks of
September 11, 2001, have been perceived as such an extraordinary turning-point
in the United States. From a European perspective, this looks very different, if
one can distance oneself from the emotionalism the American media have produced
and conveyed in their coverage of the event. Within the American popular
mythology, however, the other is always already defined as evil; it has arrived
and people were indeed not prepared for it. The very titles of films like Alien
or Armageddon make it clear that this fear predates the year 2001 by a
number of years.

So why is the other equated with evil? More than that: Why can
this equation occur in a country of immigrants of all places, in the very
country of immigration and refuge per se? A look at the history of American
culture—or simply at Martin Scorcese’s Gangs of New York—may
suggest as a speculative but plausible answer that it is always the preceding
generation of immigrants, who see the succeeding generation of newly-arrived,
hungry and ambitious strangers as a threat to their own modest living standard
for which they had struggled so hard. If such mechanisms continue over several
centuries, it may well lead to the general feeling that strangers, the new, the
other, are impostors and a social threat. For Western Europeans, whose countries
were not, until recently, faced with immigration issues, such ways of thinking
may be difficult to comprehend.

The year 2001, once again, was declared as the end of history.
Once again, people sought to extract meaning from meaninglessness. "Nothing
will ever be the same." This sentence, probably the most frequently cited
quote in the context of the attacks on the World Trade Center, testifies not
only to an enormous stupidity but also, and more importantly, to a deep
yearning: Now, finally, everything will be different; now banality and
mediocrity are given meaning. Dan Fried, Assistant Secretary of State in charge
of European Affairs at the State Department, never tires of explaining to his
European counterparts what they seem to have problems seeing: We are, Fried
maintained, facing an "unheard-of threat." Of course, such a phrasing
involves issues of medial manipulation, the abuse of political power and the
legitimization of military crimes. However, that is not my subject here.

Nevertheless, I would like to quote the contemporary Czech
philosopher Václav Bělohradský to make my point: "The famous
Slowenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek," Bělohradský observed,
"noted that in the 1970s and 80s everywhere a potential future was debated—a
post-industrial capitalism, the return of fascism, new forms of paternalism,
democratic socialism—everything seemed possible. Today everybody accepts
global capitalism as the final stage of history." The End of History is,
indeed, a topos that has spread successfully from Hegel via Vilém Flusser and
Karel Kosík to Francis Fukuyama, in the process changing its meaning to the
point of unrecognizablility. "The media," Bělohradský continued,
"most of all the Hollywood factory for instant dreams and nightmares,
are obsessed with a possible cosmic catastrophe and the extinction of life on
earth—by a lethal virus, a new ice age or an asteroid colliding with our
planet. For humankind today it is easier to imagine a cosmic catastrophe than
changing the system of global capitalism" (Interview in Právo, 12
August 2006).

The first Godzilla movie (directed by Inoshiro Honda, 1954) is
often interpreted as a Japanese attempt at coming to terms with the lost war and
the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, while this film
portrays Godzilla, the symbol of the bomb, as an evil monster, its meaning
mutates in the course of the series. In films like the 1965 Kaiju daisenso
(Monster Zero) Godzilla turns into the protector of Japan (and the entire
world, in fact) in its fight against extraterrestrial invaders.

I now anticipate Hollywood reacting accordingly. Will the
extraterrestrials finally turn into protectors of the American Way of Life
against an Islamic threat, or, on the contrary, will it be committed Islamic
suicide bombers fighting aliens to save the world? My personal guess for the
most likely scenario is that the insides of the evil fanatics with the explosive
belts really harbor little green Martians.

The computer games market typically reacts more quickly than the film
industry. American McGee, the influential games developer and the creator of Doom,
has already commented on his approach to the situation: "The Americans are
frightened. Very frightened. Of terrorism, natural catastrophes, illegal
immigrants. The nation is kept in a state of permanent panic by frequent new
warnings." McGee’s most recent work Bad Day L.A. satirized—and
cashed in on—the raging American paranoia. I am looking forward to similar
reactions from Hollywood.